Wedding exhibition

A WEDDING exhibition was being staged at the Heritage Centre in Bourne to coincide with the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton on 29th April 2011.

The event was part of the long tradition in the town to celebrate major royal occasions and was a personal success for Jim and Brenda Jones, supported by members of the Civic Society, who spent many hours organising and displaying artefacts connected with the great day which had been borrowed and donated for the occasion.

The top floor of Baldock's Mill in South Street, which has been the home of the Heritage Centre since 1981, was cleared of the usual exhibits to make way for this magnificent display of dresses, shoes, accessories and other memorabilia which recalled other more personal wedding days of past times.

The centrepiece comprised sixteen stunning wedding dresses from two centuries, all having been worn by those who donated them for the exhibition or by their parents and grandparents, the earliest from 1887. They were made from a variety of fabrics including silk, taffeta, brocade, slipper silk and even polyester.

The most unusual which had been loaned by a local lady was specially designed for her mother and dated from the Second World War of 1939-45. Material for wedding dresses was then an unobtainable luxury but this was made from an end of roll silk from Cadbury's chocolate factory at Bournville, near Birmingham, originally used to make the decorative bows on boxes of chocolates, then a luxury production which had been suspended because of the war.

The silk was given to relatives who worked at the factory and there was sufficient material left on the roll to make a dress for the bride and those for the bridesmaids and although they actually survived a later enemy bombing attack in which the wedding cake was destroyed, the ceremony went ahead without a hitch.

Brenda Jones is chairman of the Civic Society and her husband, Jim, a member of the committee. The idea for the exhibition came to them when the royal wedding was announced earlier in the year and they began work immediately, appealing for exhibits and, more importantly, mannequins or models on which to display them.

This was a problem and although there were a few in the Heritage Centre used for other previous events, more were required for the large number of wedding dresses on loan. They therefore scoured charity shops and kept a check on eBay, the Internet auction site, to find more and slowly others were bought and donated and after a further four were offered on loan by Lady Jane Willoughby, the society's president, which she had found at Grimsthorpe Castle, they had sufficient for the exhibition.

Another major feature of the event was a collection of old wedding photographs dating back more than a century. These were donated by local people from their own wedding days and all were copied to avoid damage and the originals returned. Over 100 were contributed, many featuring people who have become well known in Bourne and are now familiar faces and so it was a pleasurable challenge for visitors to spend some time discovering how many they could recognise after so many years.

Jim and Brenda were the first to provide their own wedding day picture taken at Liverpool in 1959 while others showed Dr Michael McGregor and his wife Margaret, Robert Kitchener (the Civic Society secretary) and his wife Carol, David and Sylvia Glover, Dudley and Ceri Guppy, Doug and Jean Fownes, John and Judy Smith, Mike and Ann Northen and many more.

All were also been included in a photo presentation which ran continuously for the duration of the exhibition on a computer screen in the entrance foyer.

The event was a remarkable achievement for Jim and Brenda whose last major effort at the Heritage Centre was the establishment of the Worth Gallery commemorating the life and times of Charles Worth (1825-95), founder of haute couture, who was born at Wake House and later went to London and then Paris where he established his world famous fashion house. It was their inspiration that brought the original idea to reality when it opened in April 2006 and is now a major attraction for anyone interested in the history of this town and in international fashion.

The wedding exhibition ran from Saturday 16th April to Sunday 8th May during the afternoons from 2 pm until 4 pm. Admission was free to all but many made donations to the Civic Society in lieu.